It's true: the words we assign to objects have nothing to do with the objects. I've often wondered why we call a candle "a candle," but Spanish-speakers call it "una vela" and French-speakers call it "une bougie." Obviously none of these are cognates to each other, and honestly the real reasons why they are called what they are probably has something to do with etymology, but we aren't getting into that. Saussure's point is:
"According to Billy Corgan, Postmodernism is whatever the f--- you want it to be."
Postmodernism emerged after WWII. In Literature, it's often characterized by questionable narrators, paradoxes, fragments, etc. It's pretty much the opposite of Modernism and its ideals. Ishmael Reed fits into the Postmodernism category because his work definitely rejects and, really, spits in the face of our definition of modernity. In his poem "I Pray to Chevron" he makes fun of the fact that while most people pray to their deities, the speaker, a rich guy, prays to Chevron, which as far as I could tell is a metaphor for wealth. He owns a Mercedes for every day of the week, eats caviar all the time, and sends his kids to Switzerland for no reason other than for recreation. Reed rejects the Rich & Famous's mentality that they can do whatever it is they want while the rest of us go on living our mundane little lives. His poetry reminded me a lot of Kurt Vonnegut and Chuck Palahniuk, who we all know rejects pretty much every value we as a society hold dear.
Okay, I'm going to break the rule and talk about Fight Club for a second. As everyone knows, Fight Club is about this weasel of a guy who buys expensive furniture from catalogs in an effort to make some sort of statement. "I'd flip through catalogs and wonder, 'What kind of dining set defines me as a person?'" The Narrator is pushed around by his jerk of a boss and lives a pretty normal life until one fateful night when the mysterious and headstrong Tyler Durdan tells him to punch him in the face. As it turns out of course (SPOILER ALERT!), Fight Club's big plan is to blow up all the major credit card companies, so all the debt goes away... everyone's back at zero. What could be more postmodern than that?
T.S. Eliot believed that a poet's significance is measured in relation to dead poets and artists. This is true. When a new grunge-type band comes along, magazines will compare them to Nirvana. When a band emerges that seems to break new ground and becomes an overnight worldwide sensation, they're compared to the Beatles. But that's not exactly what Eliot was getting at. He believed that tradition may indeed define the contemporary, but that the contemporary changes the essence of tradition that itself owns. Apparently Hollywood has lost its originality because lately all they've been spitting out is remakes. Bewitched, superhero movies, 21 Jump Street, all those awful horror movies that Rob Zombie feels compelled to direct, et cetera, et cetera, ET CETERA.
For example, let's compare The Shop Around the Corner, the 1940 movie
starring James Stewart and Margaret Sullavan, and 1998's You've Got Mail
starring Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan.
The Shop Around the Corner is about two coworkers at a small shop who can't stand each other but are falling in love with each other through the mail, as each other's pen pals. The girl, of course, has no idea who her pen pal is but is falling harder for him with each stroke of the pen while the ever-suave and most romantic Jimmy Stewart finds out that he's fallen for his hated coworker. In You've Got Mail it's pretty much the same except Kathleen Kelley (it's so nice to hear Tom Hanks say my name!) and Joe Fox are rival bookstore owners. They have been communicating via e-mail and Joe finds out that Kathleen is his e-mail friend. It's a perfect movie. The point is, though, that You've Got Mail takes a very familiar storyline from a classic movie made 50 years before and puts a modern twist on it by using e-mail instead of snail mail. Defined by tradition, yes. Modern twist, yes.
And as much as I HATE Across the Universe, I can't help but love what they did to "She's So Heavy." Across the Universe took Beatles' songs from yesteryears and put them in a context relevant to when the Beatles were writing and performing them, transforming the world's youth from a "Leave It to Beaver" kind of perfect to rebels who wouldn't hesitate to "stick it to the man" but they also re-recorded all the songs and had the actors sing them and they messed with the instruments. All in all a very individual move using one of the most prolific bands in the history of music.
Tilda Swinton was one of the first people I thought of when I found out what androgyny is. Of course Virginia Woolf and Samuel Coleridge weren't talking about physical androgyny, but Tilda's androgynous all the same. It's eerie.
Virginia Woolf was convinced that Coleridge was right: a creative mind
should be androgynous. A writer shouldn't just write from the point of
view from which they have always biologically seen.
I think Nicholas Sparks's writing is DEFINITELY androgynous. Let's think about it for a second: who goes to see his movies? Women. Who reads his books obsessively? Women. Who swoons over the male lead in the stories? Women. What is Nicholas Sparks? A man. For a man to write in such a way that women spend oodles of money going to the Friday night premieres for his movies and buying hardcover copies of his books, he must be pretty in-touch with his feminine side.
The Notebook was Sparks's BIG break (even bigger than the movie Message in a Bottle, which came out in 1999) was 2004's The Notebook, which is still a movie that girls freak out about. For Nicholas Sparks to appeal to women on such a deep level, and for him to have written so passionately about a young couple is amazing. Noah is every girl's DREAM, and Allie acts just like most of us girls would have.
Even though Sparks doesn't possess the kind of androgyny that Virginia Woolf would've approved of (she probably would have found him mediocre at best...I know I do), it is definitely a kind of androgyny that strikes a chord with women everywhere and with many men's feminine sides.... If Sparks wasn't an androgynous writer, none of his books would have become the sensations that they are.
